Human Rights and Human Wrongs: A Life Confronting Racism

Description

Many domains are black and cruelly white. In this book Colin Tatz, a world authority on racial conflict and abuse, a key figure in Indigenous Studies in Australia and an author of major works on genocide, Aboriginal youth suicide, and Aboriginal and Islander sporting achievements, tells his personal story. Born and educated in South Africa, Tatz worked to expose and oppose that nation's centuries-old apartheid regimes before leaving for what he thought would be a more enlightened nation, only to find in Australia striking parallels of that other dismal universe. As a researcher, writer and activist he has dedicated his life to confronting what people do to other people on the basis of their race or ethnicity, but relates here also how alienation, his Jewishness and an intriguing problem with food have been, for him, propelling forces. Tatz's story, ranging from Southern Africa to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Israel, is an important one for anyone genuinely interested in the struggle to achieve social justice for minorities and marginalised peoples.

Professor Colin Tatz AO researches, teaches and writes in the fields of Aboriginal affairs, comparative race politics, Holocaust and genocide, Jewish studies, migration, suicide, and sports history. In 1964 he founded and was the initial director of what is now the Monash Indigenous Centre. He has held chairs of Politics at the University of New England and at Macquarie University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University. He is the founding director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney.

This is a monumental book: panoptic and finely detailed, where both heart and head successfully work together. It also has the virtue of bringing within easy reach of the reader the terrible consequences of the alienation of one human group from another. - Dr Ross Mellick, review in +61J